This invention relates to an injection system for injection of a material into a receiving vessel, and to a process for injection of material into said vessel using the injection system.
Catalysts are widely in used in numerous chemical processes at industrial scale. Novel and/or improved catalysts may be discovered and researched by many methods known to those skilled in the art.
Catalyst handling and catalyst addition to a reaction apparatus are common actions to almost any chemical experiment or process involving such a catalyst. Over recent years the advent of combinatorial methods in materials science and of high throughput chemistry techniques, and in particular the growing use of robots and computers to automate catalyst and materials preparation and testing, has allowed researchers to potentially test tens to hundreds to thousands or more catalysts and materials in parallel. Much effort has gone in to developing preparation and testing apparatus for numerous types of materials and material properties (for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,776,359) and, in particular, for chemical reactions of interest (for example see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,959,297, 6,063,633 and 6,306,658). However as the number of experiments it may be possible to run in parallel has increased so the bottlenecks in catalyst testing have shifted. For example, collecting, handling and storing of experimental data has become an increasingly important area. As a further example, where a researcher had previously to only make, load and test a few catalysts a day or even in a week, the researcher now has to make a much larger number of catalysts to perform the tests on. In addition, the scale (i.e. volume of catalyst tested) on which high throughput experiments are run has generally decreased inversely to the increase in number of parallel experiments, giving corresponding difficulties in the preparation of a large number of separate small volumes of material. This problem has been addressed to some extent by the use of various robotic techniques and/or other automation to prepare said catalysts.
However, even once the catalyst material is prepared other key bottlenecks include the handling of the catalyst and other materials that have been previously prepared and, in particular, the loading of said materials in to reactors. This is particularly so in relation to the handling and loading of solid materials. We have now found an improved method for injection of materials in to a receiving vessel.